No, it’s not like stealing a physical item from a store.
“stealing” a digital copy of a movie, tv show or a game is like if the item you’re stealing from a store is infinitely copyable. Like the replicator from star trek…or that one episode of Sabrina the teenage witch with that box that can make a perfect copy of everything you put inside of it.
Of course I personally would never pirate anything, no matter how much streaming services increase their prices or how much they crack down on VPN usage to get around geo-restrictions, PIRACY IS BAD AND ONLY BAD PEOPLE DO IT.
I’ve never pirated anything in my whole life!
There is no “stealing from corporations”
It’s as easy as that
If they keep raising my food subscription I’m gonna start pirating from supermarkets too
Piracy is a response to various kinds of market failure, inequality.
It is always morally acceptable?
Morality is, literally, subjective. There is no universal answer to that question.
I personally consider anything being sold by a distributor to be fair game, no questions asked. If I pay for mainstream music, films or games, most of the time, zero of that money goes to the workers who created those artworks. It just makes rich owners richer, because they legally own rights. I would go as far as to say it’s morally wrong to pay for those things, it’s not neutral, it’s supporting a cycle of abuse at your own expense. So that’s my perspective on your ‘giant corporations’ question.
Digital copying isn’t stealing, unfortunately, because those giant companies deserve to have their hoard of capital expropriated.
No but i dont care
I’ve been pirating for years. I just don’t want to pay for things
This is me.
I just don’t care about the moral or ethical considerations.
¿Por qué no los dos?
I pirate to save money =]
I do since it’s a better service
It is always morally preferrable to pirate things made by giant corporations
Fixed It For You.
Regardless of what is regarded as a crime against the state, it is wrongdoing against the public to support corporations that seek to extract more wealth than value they produce.
Intellectual property rights were a (very) temporary monopoly to give creators an incentive to create in order to build a robust public domain.
Copyrights, patents and trademarks no longer do that. So charging for content is now rent-seeking
Corporations, their share holders and the plutocrats who own them pull wealth out of the economy by hoarding it. The whenever you buy from anything but directly from the creator, you are reducing the wealth in the economy since your money goes straight into Scrooge McDuck’s swimming coffers.
And our public domain only contains stuff from a century ago. Steamboat Willie became public domain just a year or two ago. Copyright holders and courts even assert all content should be owned and licensed, including SCOTUS. (Though the US Supreme Court is a traitor to the United States and its constitution.)
Pirate everything. Steal from companies for they have already stolen from you.
While your mega corporation is extremely rich, if tomorrow everyone starts pirating, that corporation will go bankrupt in a year. And all those TV shows you enjoyed won’t be produced anymore. No more new movies with cool stunts and special effects. No more games with insane graphics.
As a consumer of that big corpo content you don’t have the moral high ground to say “I never cared anyways about your shitty mass-consumer stuff”. You care because you pirated it to watch/play it.
So in the end, you only got your cake because someone else overpaid for theirs. Infinite replicability argument does not hold because it costs money to make content. And it’s a risky investment, so at times you want to get more back than you invested, cuz other times you’ll spend 50 millions on a game nobody wants to play, and lose 40 of those.
By pirating you inadvertently cause damage to the industry and if everyone followed your steps your favorite games/movies would ceise to exist. But for now it works cuz most people don’t pirate. So, are you morally safe, anon?
And all those TV shows you enjoyed won’t be produced anymore.
Wrong. Just gets sold off and made by someone else. Unless the whole system crashes, which would be a plus, but isn’t gonna happen
By pirating you inadvertently cause damage to the industry and if everyone followed your steps your favorite games/movies would ceise to exist.
Cease. Humans are inherently creative, creative works would still be made
So, are you morally safe, anon?
F as r and away: yup
Unless the whole system crashes, … would be a plus
I already knew someone would reply that, and addressed it.
You can’t say any of that. You are enjoying a product of a system as it exists. If it crashed and would never be rebuilt, all you’d have left is independent cinema/games. This already exists, and you could go consume that. But you don’t.
There’s no guarantee that in absence of big corpo with profits there will be anything produced like your favorite TV show.
I can promise you one thing: if no one pays for what they watch, there will be no TV shows. Scripting, cast, production, and delivery, all cost a lot of money. If tomorrow you inact a low that prohibits charging money for media content, no new system will emerge. Or what you’ll see is kinda what YouTube has: short videos with built-in ads, and potentially sponsored content that you’ll never know about.
So, right now, you’re damaging the only system we know that produces content that you enjoy.
Humans are inherently creative, creative work would still be made
Ah, I see. You want someone else to work for free, so you get your content for free.
Maybe you never talked to an independent artist. Who are in their 30s barely manage to make their ends meet, and are looking for any chance to get into a different career path.
No, anon, you in particular aren’t morally safe. You make lame excuses for your inability to pay.
My moral is always on match with that of the company so in most cases everything is acceptable.
Given that no one makes a fuss about it when corporations do the stealing, I think so.
Worrying about “property” of any parasite is something that I never bother to do.
Giving money to your enemy is idiotic tho.
There is a class war out there and normies are too busy funding their oppressors
Giving money to your enemy is idiotic tho. There is a class war out there and normies are too busy funding their oppressors
Absolutely. At the end of the day, most of the moral ideals being thrown around are, at the end of the day, nice ideas.
Giant corporations exist to get more money and, history shows, media companies will happily brainwash us and buy oppressive politicians just to push their profits up. Furthermore, they serve as a megaphone for the ideas of the owner class, who are historically the core force behind fascism when society is in crisis.
Giving them your resources is fucking suicidal.
No, it’s not like stealing a physical item from a store.
I’d argue stealing physical items from massive corporations is also morally acceptable. If you shoplift from a small mom & pop store, you’re actively hurting your community, however, if you shoplift from Wal-Mart, you’re actively hurting an entity which is hurting your community, therefore helping your community.
Shoplifting from Walmart hurts my knees because the boss won’t believe that our onhand numbers are wrong and makes me check high and low before I can nil pick it 🥲
This isn’t an ethical argument against shoplifting btw, this is an ethical argument in favor of nuking Walmart
Staling sustinence from societal cancer is practically an immune response.
If you shoplift from a small mom & pop store, you’re actively hurting your community
Unless you’re part of a riot, then it’s okay.
Terrible bait. I’m disappointed.
Rage bait. Yawn.
perhaps the only ethical consumption under capitalism is that which denies capitalists their profit.
I mean…if the movie is good you should support it. Vote with your wallet.
I mean…if the movie is good you should support it
What is ‘it’? The movie is a published work, it can’t be financially supported. Who is being supported with the money you pay?
Vote with your wallet.
Unfortunately, consumer boycott (and conversely, support) usually isn’t an effective strategy at this scale you’re talking about. Unless you and all your friends are voting with a few thousand dollars, it’s hardly going to make a dent in the numbers.
